Gordon State College will be offering 6 hours of credit for
language study in Barcelona. You can receive credit at the beginning or intermediate
level or in conversation at the 2000 level. If you've had no college Spanish,
you'll get six hours of Beginning Spanish. If you have
had one year of Beginning Spanish at the college-level and earned a C or
higher, you will receive 6 hours of intermediate credit. If you
have had Intermediate Spanish, you'll be registered for Spanish 2201 and 2202,
Spanish Conversation. (Credit is contingent, of course, on satisfactory
completion of the course of study.) You will take Spanish courses 20
hours a week.

You'll be taken on afternoon excursions twice a week, to
museums, parks, cathedrals, or buildings of architectural interest, and on
Saturday or Sunday, if you stay in town, you may be taken on longer excursions
to places like Montserrat,
a monastery hidden away in the mountains, or Tibidabo, the highest point in Barcelona. The
rest of your time is your own.

Barcelona, a city of 3 million
people, is located on the Mediterranean Sea.
Students are never bored in Barcelona.
Most spend their first few afternoons on the beach, but the city has much more
than that to offer. La SagradaFamilia (Holy Family), a cathedral by the world
famous architect AntoniGaudí,
fascinates natives and tourists. Barcelona
also boasts several other unusual Gaudí buildings. On
the way to the zoo and the Parc de la Ciutadella, you pass the Picasso Museum. The Gothic
Neighborhood is the oldest part of the city; the graffiti on the walls is older
than the U.S.A.Güell
Park is famous for its tile mosaics, especially the dragon.

The city also has two amusement parks. One is on Montjuïc, where the 1992 summer Olympics were held, and you
can tour the stadium. The Ramblas, the most famous
street in Barcelona,
is a sight in itself. It is lined with street performers of all sorts—from
clowns to impersonators to flamenco dancers. Shopping in Barcelona
is often akin to shopping in Mexico.
The Pakistani men who own the tourist shops along the Ramblas
stand in the doorway and try to entice you inside the shop, where they’ll often
say to female students, "Special price—just for American girls!" You
can bargain with them much the same way that you do in Mexico. Once you have
your quota of tourist items, you can go to other areas of the city to buy what
the natives do. You find everything from mall shops to "Todo a Cien"
("Everything for 100 pesetas") stores. On the Ramblas
there is also a famous food market. There you can buy fresh fruit of all sorts,
usually more cheaply than in the U.S. In 2014, strawberries were about
$1.00 per pound.

Your four weeks in Barcelona
mean 3 weekends, and you may travel out of town on the weekends if you
like. Several low budget airlines, such as Ryan Air, Easy
Jet, and Vueling,
make flying from country to country considerably cheaper than flying from state
to state. Within Spain,
you can fly Iberia, SpanAir, or Air Europa or take the train or bus.
You can visit Pamplona, where the bulls run, or
go to Granada to see the Alhambra, the beautiful Moorish palace about
which Washington Irving wrote.

The cost is $3390; this includes lodging with a Spanish
family, 2 meals a day, tuition, and insurance. Please note: this does not
include airfare, because individual airfare in February is cheaper than group
airfare earlier in the school year.But
also note that it DOES include tuition, which most programs do not include in
their price, & airfare is cheaper than tuition.Do some comparison shopping. You will
probably find that there is no program in which you can spend 4 weeks in Europe and get 6 hours of credit for any less.

Classes are from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. 2:00 is the
normal lunch hour in Spain
(some restaurants don’t even open until 12:30 or 1:00), but there are sandwich
places where you can get a snack near the school. You’re expected to be
in class and alert at 9:30, although you are allowed 4 hours of absence, which
you’ll probably want to use to make an extended weekend trip to a place like Venice or London.

Below is a summary of the information. Consider learning
Spanish in Barcelona!

Included:
lodging with a Spanish family, two meals a day, tuition, insurance Not included: air transportation, ground
transportation in the U.S. and Europe, passport, lunches, spending money,
entrance fees to sites of interest, books, extra excursions required of
colloquium students Dates: May 23-June 20, 2015

Courses:
Beginning Spanish (SPAN 1001 and 1002)

Intermediate Spanish (SPAN 2001 and 2002)

Spanish Conversation (SPAN 2201 and 2202)*

Colloquium in Spanish Art &
Architecture – a two-hour course that requires a level of fluency in SpanishCredit: 6 semester hours (5 if the colloquium is taken)